Customer Journey B2B
The customer journey in B2B Lead Generation is the process
from initial contact with a brand to purchase and through the aftersales stages.
What is worth knowing about the customer journey?
A customer journey is a path a customer takes from learning about a product to getting answers to questions, to making a purchase. In Lead Generation, each interaction with a brand during the buying journey is called a touchpoint (a contact point or point of contact). Examples of touchpoints include searching for customer reviews, online ads, trial subscriptions, online chat, or email.
What is the purpose of the customer journey?
From the customer’s perspective, the purpose of the journey is not always to purchase a product (transaction). The purpose of the customer journey depends on the customer’s needs. Most often, the purpose of the customer journey is to get information (education) or to find something (navigation).
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a visualization of the points of contact where a customer interacts with a company on his or her purchase journey and after the purchase. In practice, it is possible to create several customer journey maps based on the patterns and behavior of different types of customers (customer persona).
What is the purpose of a customer journey map?
Customer journey maps help understand how and why customers interact with a company. A customer journey map answers the question of how customers find information about a company and what problems they want to solve. The goal of building a customer journey map is to improve the customer experience by helping solve their problems. A better customer experience ultimately means more sales. By understanding the user journey, companies can create better, friendlier experiences. When combined with a marketing funnel, maps help guide marketing efforts and encourage potential customers to make a purchase.
Which points on the travel map are important?
Every touchpoint is important because it can help or hurt a customer’s impression of a brand and its product. A bad experience at any point can mean an abandoned journey, so it’s in a company’s best interest to make sure the user gets the information and answers they need along the way. Touch points are important to monitor because they reveal the types of decisions customers make during their journey to purchase a product or service. Touch points occur when a customer engages with a website or mobile app. But they also include customer interactions across all media channels before the customer discovers the company’s website.
How to determine the touch points on the customer journey map?
A successful marketing strategy starts with knowing your customers’ needs and pain points. Pain points are specific problems that customers and potential customers want to solve. To build a customer journey map, you need to answer the question “how do you help customers solve their pain points? Touchpoints relate to a specific context or need. When identifying touchpoints, you need to answer how a particular interaction can satisfy a customer need. When determining touchpoints, consider communication channels such as social media or Goolge Ads.
Intent of contact
Each touchpoint in the customer path has a context and relates to a need. For example, a need may be the purchase of project management software, and the context of a site visit may be curiosity resulting from a response to Ads. Touchpoints have a context and reflect a customer need. To make the best use of touchpoints, they should be carefully defined for all media channels. Touchpoints that are customer-centric and address customer needs and intentions will yield the most useful data on customer motivations, preferences and behavior.
Customer journey map
In each step of the purchase path, the customer interacts with the brand, which builds the customer experience. Depending on whether the customer experience is positive, the goal of conversion will move closer or further away. The principle of building a purchase path says that without a customer journey map, the customer will end up not being where they need to be. In practice, this means that you need to anticipate different customer behaviors at different points along the path and visualize them.
Who creates the customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a process that covers different areas of a company’s business. In the B2B and SaaS sectors, customers interact with the brand in marketing and purchasing processes but also aftersales processes. Customer journey mapping therefore involves customer service, marketing, service and support departments. Each of these 4 areas has an equally significant impact on sales. With proper customer research, marketers can use these touchpoints to create a customer journey map.
How to create a customer journey map for Lead Generation?
In Lead Generation practice, each user goes through 4 key points on the customer path: first visit to the website, leaving contact information, social media contact and first conversion. At each of the points of contact, the customer path should point the way toward a conversion. It is crucial to distinguish the customer’s intent from among the 3 main ones-educational, commercial, and purchase. The journey map at the time of the first visit should offer at least 3 alternative paths for each of these intentions. In B2B and SaaS, potential customers are not ready to buy at the initial stage, so the journey map should emphasize the commercial and educational path.
Marketing funnel vs. customer experience
Passing through points on the customer path to another phase of the marketing funnel. Conversion itself is a particularly important phase, as B2B and SaaS data clearly shows that customer retention is more cost-effective than new customer acquisition. Not only is customer retention less costly than acquiring new customers, it also helps build loyalty and create brand evangelists.
Visualize the customer path
A customer journey map can be a visualization in the form of a chart, timeline or even a presentation. Customer path visualization often uses infographics and timelines to depict customer need, context, behavior but also customer emotions. A well-planned customer journey takes into account the customer’s needs and contributes to the customer’s satisfaction with contact at multiple touchpoints with products or services. A helpful tool for building the customer path is offered by programs such as Journey Builder or Interaction Studio in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Why create a Customer Journey?
Churn, or the phenomenon of customers leaving a brand, can occur even after one negative experience, which is why it is so important to provide only positive experiences to your customers. Creating customer journey maps helps minimize the risk of customers leaving the brand.
Marketing's sources of knowledge about customer experience
Creating a customer journey is based on information from customer needs. The primary source of internal information for marketing is CRM, while external information is Google Analytics. Additional sources include marketing automation programs that track, for example, email openings and social media data. A valuable source is marketing surveys among customers and business partners in the case of B2B. External sources such as trend reports are also useful
How do you create a personalized customer journey?
Determining where the customer is in the path, and effectively tailoring content, is the biggest challenge of a marketing strategy using the customer journey. Personalizing the customer journey means showing customers that you really know them. An example of personalization is personalized cross-selling, so as to display the products that customers are most likely to buy. Personalization is a goal that every well-known brand strives for. Personalizing the customer journey requires the support of the right technologies, without which real-time content customization is impossible.
What is a customer persona?
Customer persona are profiles of a company’s typical customers. Customer profiles take into account such characteristics as age, gender, place of residence (demographics); industry and position of the persona; needs, requirements for the product or service. In practice, there is not one profile of an ideal customer but at least several customer persona.
Customer journey: where to start?
If you don’t know where to start the customer journey, you can always write to us. At drySEO, we have years of experience in introducing SaaS products and the High-Tech industry to foreign markets. DrySEO’s Lead Generation strategies effectively utilize customer journey and customer segmentation in major foreign markets.